


within that bending sickle's compass

by syllogismos



Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Families of Choice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllogismos/pseuds/syllogismos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Every parting is uniquely tragic, Eve. You mustn’t linger on them.”</p>
<p>They sat at a mosaic-inset table, blue and yellow and white, the shine worn off the tile where generation after generation of teacup and saucer had scratched the surface. Marlowe took one of Eve’s hands in his.</p>
<p>“Every reunion, on the other hand, is identically sublime. It’s good to see you again.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	within that bending sickle's compass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laura47](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laura47/gifts).



Adam couldn’t watch directly; he watched at the window, the one with the curtains stapled to, so he had to pull them from the side to peer out onto the cloud-darkened and twilight-dim street. It was empty. Safe.

Ian whimpered, not yet conscious.

It was raining, solid drops of wet slapping the pavement, shining darkly, frustrated wholly in their quest to cleanse tired, forsaken Detroit of its sins.

Ian groaned and half sat up, leaning on an elbow to retch over the edge of the sofa. He brought nothing up, but he kept retching and gasping, reaching for breaths that would never satisfy, not anymore. He coughed and hyperventilated, chest heaving. Arriving at a full panic, he pushed himself fully upright, clutching his knees in white-knuckled fingers and staring at the spot of floor between his feet. There was dried blood there, his own, though he didn’t know it. (Ava was _always_ sloppy.)

Releasing one knee, Ian felt for the puncture wounds in his neck, his fingers walking slowly until they stopped, and when they stilled, Ian’s spine stiffened, and Adam knew that he _remembered_. Ian remembered, and the pace of his breathing increased further still.

“Take it easy,” Adam turned from the mirror of Ian’s Waking reflected on the glass of the window to face its reality, his responsibility now.

“Try to slow your breathing.” Adam stayed back, behind Ian, behind the sofa, but he stepped close enough to lay one hand on the nape of Ian’s neck. “Or just stop breathing,” he continued. “It doesn’t help anything.”

Ian gulped a half-sob, half-laugh and nearly choked on it. Adam squeezed his neck gently, and Ian tensed further for a moment, but finally sighed, dropping his own hand from the small wounds that had transformed him. Another pair of seconds and he collapsed to his side, curled foetal. His heart was still and silent, and he exhaled long and slow, then stopped breathing altogether. He understood.

Adam stepped back and cast about, passing over Williams Lawes and the other instruments Ian had procured for him. He caressed them in turn, asking a question that none leapt to answer. _What do I do now? What comfort can I offer?_ Eventually he turned back to the window and waited, pulling the curtain aside again to watch the rain fall and fall.

Adam heard—and saw, in the shivery reflection on the glass—Ian sit up, then stand up. He stretched and tested his limbs.

“ _It was night, and the rain fell,_ ” Adam began to recite, “ _And, falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood._ ”

“What is that?”

Adam put the window at his back. “Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Was he–?”

“No.” Adam paused. “Although he wanted to be.”

Ian looked around, reevaluating Adam’s habitat under the light of new information. “So this is why I always had to piss in the yard.”

“Yes.”

“ _Fuck_ , man. I’m not going to be able to get the stuff you need anymore. _Shit._ I’m sorry, Adam.”

“We’ll be okay.”

“I should have left when you said. Jesus _fuck_ , man. I didn’t know.”

“I know, Ian. It’s OK. We’ll be okay.”

* * *

Adam returned from Dr. Watson’s generously supplied but tense. He’d had to concede to accept the doctor’s goods by delivery in future, the concession in exchange for a promise of greater quantities. (Ian was young and suffered the hunger of the newly undead, nearly insatiable and tragically unfair.)

There were two port glasses on the coffee table, one blood-stained, the other clean and clear. Ian was clearly the recipient of the first; he was blissed-out, head hanging off the seat of the sofa, legs up over the back, Jimi Hendrix on the turntable, which spun “All Along the Watchtower” into the air.

Adam secured the new supply of blood first, then went to find Eve.

Eve was packing, frantically.

“Eve.”

Eve stopped, but only for a moment. “I have to go back. Marlowe has blood poisoning.”

“Oh, _Eve_.” Adam stepped over the threshold and bent to kneel beside her. He wrapped his arm around her waist, and she sagged into him. “He’ll be all right.”

“No, not this time. You haven’t seen him– You don’t understand. He’s _frail_ , and not all here. He gets lost in time. Sometimes it’s hard to get him back. I have to go.” Eve said it again, almost sobbing, “I have to _go_.”

Eve left; Adam and Ian stayed. Marlowe’s blood supply must have been interrupted, Eve had reasoned, so it didn’t make sense for them all to go.

“I don’t want you to go,” Adam had pouted.

Eve had held his face in her hands and pressed her fingertips into his cheekbones. “Don’t miss me, darling. You have Ian to take care of now. He needs you.”

Adam cast his eyes to the side and tried to look down, but Eve held him fast.

“Promise me you’ll try.”

“I’ll try.”

* * *

The third night after Eve’s departure broke open under a full moon, almost daylight-bright in a clear sky. It had stopped raining, but it was cold, cold enough for a frost to form almost as soon as the sun had set. The pavement, the bare trees, and the skeletal shapes of two cars across the street—recently abandoned and gutted of their wheels and engines—all glittered under the frost.

It took _effort_ for Adam to pull the heavy drape aside and look out onto the cold street. He swayed, slightly, imagining a great, heavy pendulum inside his chest swinging to and fro, pulling his centre of gravity this way and that, to the rhythm of his grief.

Marlowe had died not long after Eve’s arrival. He might have been hanging on, just for her, but for what? Her grief was no less deep for having witnessed his passing; she’d barely been able to choke out the words, and something was broken inside her, a jagged wound gaping behind her once-piercing gaze. Adam had shuddered (and ached, oh how he’d _ached_ , deep and sharp between his ribs) even to see it through the simulacrum of phosphorescing cathode-ray-tube pixels on a screen.

The blood-hunger gnawed at Adam’s soul, but he ignored it. What was the point?

Ian made up for Adam’s lack of appetite. He drank so much his cheeks regained a rosy glow, and a manic energy followed. He tried to fix the bathroom. (Tried. Dr. Watson made a delivery on night six after Eve’s departure and asked to use it; it flooded when the good doctor flushed, and Adam had glared daggers in Ian’s direction. “Call a plumber,” he’d snapped. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in seven hundred years, it’s _not to fuck with the_ fucking _plumbing_.”

Ian found a plumber who would come just after dark, no questions asked. Adam went for a drive and came back to a house with a working toilet he’d never need again. He faded into unconsciousness when Dawn’s fingers started to tickle the horizon, the seven-day fast sitting heavy on his bones.)

After eight nights, Adam stopped getting out of bed, and he stopped answering the phone. A slow tide of anger rose and fell with the cadence of Ian’s voice when Adam heard him talking quietly with Eve, talking about _him_ and about What Is To Be Done. Adam punched his pillow and cursed, but no momentum grew from his anger, at least not enough to overcome the lumbering, leaden inertia of his apathy and exhaustion.

On the twelfth night, Ian tried. Tried to get Adam to drink something, just half an ounce. Tried to get Adam out of bed. Tried to goad him, when all else had failed.

“This is _sad_ , man, to see you acting all ‘emo’…” Ian made quotation marks with his fingers in the air; Adam hadn’t even opened his eyes, didn’t see, but Ian picked up steam. “I mean, what the _fuck_? You’re immortal! You get to live forever! People have _killed_ for that, a fuck of a lot of people, you know? Don’t take it for fucking granted so much. Because–” Ian paused, and Adam waited, intently, though he didn’t show it, didn’t even crack an eyelid. “Because you get to have everything. You have _everything_.”

Adam bolted upright, boiling over. “I get to _have_ everything? Really?!” Adam grabbed Ian by the wrist and frog-marched him out to the parlour, to his wall of portraits. “Who is left of my friends, hmm? What exactly do I _have_ right now? I have nothing. _Nothing._ When you don’t die, when all you do is live on and on and on, the world doesn’t _give_ , it _takes_. Nothing sticks. Everything changes, and not for the better. Everything you’ve ever loved is lost or ruined or fucking _both_.”

Adam collapsed onto the sofa, head in his hands. Ian tried to comfort, laying a hand to Adam’s bowed back, only to have it violently shrugged off.

“Don’t,” Adam swallowed roughly. “Please just fucking _go_.”

Ian left.

* * *

Marlowe hadn’t talked in abstractions, not very often outside his quatrains and couplets, at least. But once, after Paris, when Eve had first found him and her refuge in Tangier, with the scent of mint tea still new and fresh and heavy in the air, and after an embrace and a grin so broad it threatened to split his time-wrinkled cheeks, he’d extended his welcome in words of wisdom: “Every parting is uniquely tragic, Eve. You mustn’t linger on them.”

They sat at a mosaic-inset table, blue and yellow and white, the shine worn off the tile where generation after generation of teacup and saucer had scratched the surface. Marlowe took one of Eve’s hands in his.

“Every reunion, on the other hand, is identically sublime. It’s good to see you again.”

Marlowe was right, then, and he was right after he passed, when Eve returned to a frighteningly still and silent house; Ian was gone, and Adam himself close to starvation, though his supply was flush. The wooden bullet had been a hollow threat, beautiful and tangible, but in the end nothing more than an _objet d’art_ , just as he’d claimed. This, on the other hand, was the real danger: Eve found him in bed, only barely conscious even in the deep of the night. His skin was cold and blue; terror squeezed a vice-grip around Eve’s heart, and yet still the reunion was sublime. All of it was sublime: gathering Adam’s head into her lap, stroking his cheeks and his forehead, coaxing his mouth open to accept just a few drops of blood at first, until he had the strength to sit up and swallow, and even the old penny taste in her mouth when he kissed her.

“I drove Ian away,” Adam admitted, later, sitting between Eve’s legs, his head on her shoulder.

“It’s okay.” She kissed his temple. “We’ll see him again.”

* * *

Three hundred years rendered some things easier. Travel was easier, if slower. A self-driving car didn’t need windows. Adam could tuck himself in and set off from Seattle, following I–90 to Neon in the course of a day, give or take. He thrilled to the risk of something (in order of likelihood: a stop and search, a software malfunction, a freeway collision) forcing the car to open, exposing his limp, sleeping form to the inferno.

Eve still only travelled at night.

Adam set out just before dawn, but only because he hadn’t left himself any choice. He wasn’t in _that_ place anymore (the commissioning-a-wooden-bullet place), and the thrill of the sunlight on the other side of thin layers of aluminium and mirror-painted plexiglass didn’t carry the sharp edge of temptation it sometimes had.

The ride to Neon would be long but comfortable. Ian had refitted the interior for just this purpose; he’d reupholstered the sofa bed with fine-grain leather (and oiled it recently), and he’d replaced every component in the sound system with his own pieces, down to solid copper-core wires, every one of them. He kept a collection of records under the sofa, albums just for the car. Traveling music. Music to transport the soul.

Adam’s iPhone vibrated in his pocket. It was several centuries an antique, but it was one of the ones Apple had made with real glass, front and back, heavy and solid and real. Eve had long since switched to using a Glass, like all the zombies, and poked gentle fun at Adam for his stubborn attachment to the older things.

> Have you left yet?

Adam actually liked having the car answer for him. “Tell Eve I’m just about to, please.”

“Message delivered,” the car confirmed.

Adam had a ritual for the start of every journey: he stretched out on the sofa, fingers laced behind his head, and he didn’t put any music on, not at the beginning. He listened to the engine’s faint rumbling to life and closed his eyes to concentrate on the changes of acceleration tugging on his muscles and bones, shifting them to and fro as the car exited the garage and picked a path to the freeway (a different one every time, navigational algorithms didn’t have _habits_ ) . Once the car had stopped accelerating and all motion became undetectable, Adam would choose a record and put it on.

But this time he paused and pulled the phone from his pocket instead. Eve answered immediately, smiling.

“I’m on the freeway.”

“You should get some rest then. You look tired.”

“No– I mean, I will. But I’m all right, don’t worry. I think this city is agreeing with me.” Adam paused to stroke his thumb over Eve’s image on the screen, the glass as smooth as one of her cheeks, if colder. In only a day, he’d be able to touch again, and the ache would ease.

“By the way, Ian is bringing a guest.”

“A guest?”

“He won’t say who. It’s quite vexing.”

Adam laughed. “He might be vexing you on purpose.”

“I had considered that, yes, but there’s something… I can’t quite pin it down, which only has me more intrigued. I don’t think it matters who it turns out to be. The surprise will be so nice.”

“I love you, Eve.”

“I love you too, darling. Travel safe.”

Adam put on Sonny Landreth (swamp blues from just before Louisiana was swallowed by the sea) and turned up the volume until he could feel each note resonate when he pressed his hand to the window. Still no one in three hundred years had played a slide like Sonny had played a slide. In his darker days, Adam would have grieved the loss and let anger fester, but he’d learned, at long last, to cherish what remained instead: recordings, in this case, on vinyl and lossless digital, enough of them to celebrate. He closed his eyes, listening, and let the car carry him home.

* * *

The full moon provided enough light to outline the shape of the settlement, dug in between the hills. The pointed tops of the thatched huts were too sharp and regular to be natural; despite being nestled closely among the trees, eventually a pattern coalesced, and the shape of the village emerged: concentric circles around a central common land, in the dark not visible as much more than a clearing in the trees.

Eve removed the scarf from her hair and tucked it into her jacket pocket along with her gloves before descending the narrow path leading from the crest of the hill down into the hidden places of the valley. A cotton carrying cloth embroidered in silk covered over the basket she carried. Eve stroked the cloth as she walked, tracing her fingers over the arrangement of scarlet, gold, and black squares and diamonds, faded with the hundreds of years since its fine working at the fingertips of a dark-eyed concubine in Meknes, laughing and joking with her sister-wives as she worked, her needle throwing fuzzy spots of light this way and that as it darted and ducked.

She nodded to the guard on watch as she crossed the invisible threshold, and he nodded back, the whites of his eyes a shocking pale against his dark skin.

The village was bustling, despite the late hour. Everyone was preparing for her arrival, carrying steaming platters and pots to the buffet at the side of the amphitheater where they would soon gather to eat and drink and draw lots to see who would submit to provide the payment Eve required in exchange for the contents of her basket: _amanita muscaria_ , the highest yield Eve had fostered yet.

They all of them had played a part in finding this way to survive. How to grow the coveted fungi out of season was what Adam had discovered, quite by accident, though he liked to remind Eve that a great number of scientific discoveries over the course of history were accidental, and the role of chance in their discovery did not diminish their power. Ian, young and business-savvy in a way neither Adam nor Eve had ever quite cottoned to despite their long years, he was the one who discovered the market for the toadstools, and he made the first introduction, but it was Eve who successfully negotiated the terms, and Eve who served as their ambassador to the people out of time, the people who had rejected the progress of centuries and whose blood was so pure and fresh Eve had felt half a millennium fall away the first time she’d had a taste.

On the occasion of every exchange she brought sweets for the children, and every visit she traded wisdom with the elders as those selected for payment had an artery tapped each. There was a ceremony around this as well—everyone watched because everyone bled, metaphorically, in payment for what Eve provided, which was the chance to travel _beyond_.

“Don’t tell them it’s just overstimulation of their GABA receptors,” Adam had said, after Eve’s first successful démarche.

“That’s why I go to them, darling, not you,” Eve had countered.

The toadstools were counted and wrapped, individually, for storage. (Some would be dried and ground into a fine powder, for not all could be consumed immediately.) Lots were drawn to select the donors, and the lines were opened, one by one. Eve emptied her pockets for the children and to distract herself from the delicious copper tang just barely detectable on the midnight breeze. She’d get a taste soon enough, and it would be even better when shared.

* * *

Ian rang the doorbell, recognising it with a twitch of a smile as one of Adam’s restorations. He waited on the porch under the newly-risen moon until Eve came to invite him over the threshold, but once he was inside, he accepted Eve’s embrace stiffly and didn’t take his shoes or gloves off.

“Is Adam here yet?”

“Mm, he’s out in the garden.” Eve cocked her head to the side, curiosity peaked.

“Ah, of course. Do you mind if I– I’d like to talk to him.”

Ian was halfway out the door when Eve remembered to ask, “Weren’t you bringing someone?”

“Yes, but– Later. Adam–”

Ian retreated hastily, and Eve closed the door behind him, puzzled.

Adam was working on the generator and didn’t notice Ian’s approach. Ian watched him work, content to wait and steep in his memories of this place. Of this place, and yet not of _this_ place. It was the same land, and the house was similar, but it wasn’t the same house. Before Detroit had become Neon, Detroit had fallen even further into ruins, then submitted to the cleanse of fire first, then floods, two of them. Nothing remained of the old city on the surface, but every once in a while after a heavy rain something would emerge from the mud—a street sign, an old door, a merry-go-round tagged with graffiti. Ian had worked salvage for a while when the rains were more frequent, because nostalgia was always profitable, and he’d always liked finding things for people, finding things that made them happy.

“ _Ian_.” The tone in Adam’s voice made Ian think he’d said it more than once. “It’s good to see you.”

Adam hugged him, one hand on the back of his neck, oddly familiar, holding him briefly close. He smelled like electricity and old books.

“Good to see you too, man.”

Adam stepped back and looked around. “I thought you were bringing someone.”

“Yeah, about that– I just, I guess, you know, it might have been a mistake to think that you’d– I probably should have asked first, you know?”

“You don’t need to ask, Ian. Family is family. Your family is our family.”

Ian laughed, but there were nerves in it. “Actually that’s very true. You see, I brought Ava with me, but she doesn’t have to stay. She understands now, that she might not be welcome, after everything. But I’ve forgiven her, and I thought maybe, but, you know, maybe not. Maybe it’s too much.”

“Eve?”

“Doesn’t know yet. I wanted to ask you first.”

Adam took his work gloves off and rubbed at the back of his neck. “You and Ava are–?”

“Together,” Ian supplied. “Yes.”

“She’s family then. Your family, and Eve’s family.” Adam paused. “Is she here already?”

“She’s in the car. And Adam—she’s changed. I promise she has.”

“Well, come on then,” Adam manhandled Ian toward the gate. “Let’s go get her.”

With the four of them together raising their glasses, the blood tasted like new life, innocent and sweet.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [egelantier](http://archiveofourown.org/users/egelantier/pseuds/egelantier) for beta and #antidiogenes for general, ever-reliable writerly support.
> 
> It was quite by accident that I discovered Poe's "Silence: A Fable" (from which Adam quotes) while writing this story. It is _supremely_ bizarre, and highly recommended if you like that kind of thing. It also contains this gem of a description, which could be (IMO) a description of Adam in his Dark Days:
> 
> _...[H]is brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude._
> 
> Title adapted from whoever-you-believe's sonnet #116, from which Eve quoted in the film.


End file.
